Your life is not the breathing space squeezed between your birth and your demise. In fact it is not “your life” as such. You own none of it: your failures, your disappointments, your accidents, your successes, your failed attempts at mastery and your many inabilities. Even “your” thoughts are not the things in your head …Continue Reading >>>

As a young clinical psychologist in training, I was often preoccupied with the ‘deeper’ philosophical questions about human behaviour – the ones we in the profession hardly ever examined in public when we were taught to produce a CBT chart for clients, prepare a patient for electroconvulsive therapy, or administer some antipsychotic medication. For me, …Continue Reading >>>

Humility is not merely admitting that the world doesn’t spin around us – because owning up to this still preserves, in small doses, the idea that we are apart from the world, instead of what the world is doing. Humility is recognizing that we are the world’s spin, the dizziness of things. As such, aloofness, …Continue Reading >>>

It is still fashionable to think of souls and feelings as ‘things inside’ of us and their expressions through words and gestures as ‘outside’ of us. Two separate qualities divided by a gap we don’t know how to bridge. The idea of the ‘ghost in the machine’ still lurks around in the corners of our …Continue Reading >>>

If I could define ‘nature’, what would I say? Would I look disdainfully away from my laptop screen and fix my gaze on the sonorous distance where elder mountains, capped in white and wisdom, sit in silence? Do I abandon these modern grey concrete slabs of brick and gloom – which is the city – …Continue Reading >>>